FlashForward: Series Review

Standford Wedeck, Bryce Varley, Shelly Vreede, Anastasia Markham, President Segovia, and of course my personal favorite, Special Agent Danforth Crowley - The man who was assigned to protect Olivia and popped up in the background of two or three episodes. The man who's particular name just had to be said out loud. For some reason, as I enter into this Season 1/complete series review of FlashForward the first thing that springs to my mind are the cavalcade of ridiculous names. To be clear, ridiculous names for a TV show. Names that don't exactly roll off the tongue with ease. To be fair, most of the names might have come from the Robert J. Sawyer book, which leads me to believe that it's easier to accept a name like Lloyd Simcoe on the printed page than it is to hear it said aloud over and over again. Hell, even the name Benford is kind of mopey. And it's not as if I needed every character to be named Jake Steele (I mean there was a Janis Hawk for crying out loud!) but the name "Agent Benford" is really lifeless. It sounds like a dreary town. Or a dreary butler. Living in a dreary town.

I know I've complained about this series a bunch, and thank you all for tolerating my rants, but I figured I should get everything off my chance here and now since, well, there is no more FlashForward to behold. These people had ridiculous, distracting names. Mark Benford was a depressing , marble-mouthed dope who had no business being as Sherlock Holmes-ian as he was. And the fact that he was a recovering alcoholic, for whatever reason, made him even more unsympathetic, if you can believe it. Most of the time he was dense as a doorknob, so that the show could stagger the revelations and have them spread out over the season. But then there were moments where Mark was randomly ingenious, being able to figure out extraordinarily tricky puzzles and clues left by the villains.

Two guys pushin'.

I think the only time I appreciated Mark was during his final moments, when he almost single handedly took out the masked death squad coming to kill him. Of course, it would have been much better if it had turned out that Mark had set a trap for them and had just been pretending to be drunk and helpless. But that didn't happen. He got drunk and stupid on the one night of the year when being drunk and stupid would lead to his death, and then, at the last minute, decided to sober up and go to his office with a clear head and take out the villains who, in turn, should have known that he had seen them coming.

One of the big things that I never quite understood on FlashForward was "how did our characters see themselves outside of themselves in their flash visions?" I've written enough about the paradox involved in seeing a future version of yourself…who would have also seen the future vision of themselves already. In that same spot... and yet somehow still wound up there. But what I want to know now is why did everyone have an out of body experience? Why did everyone see themselves like they were watching a movie? Like the way that, well, we were seeing them? Why weren't they inside their own head, looking out through their own eyes? And why were they somehow not privy to what they were thinking when they were doing stuff in the future? Like, they wouldn't know where they were, or why they called someone. It was supposed to be a consciousness shift, but what we got was the characters getting a look into their life like they were looking into a crystal ball. That's not science. Is it? Who knows. Whatever. It must be hard to transport a person into their future and still keep their exact future a mystery from them. It's what they had to do to make this series work on a basic level, but it ultimately made the show feel forced.